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Twitter Analytics: A Quick Look

Social media analytics is the process of tracking, collecting, and analyzing data from social networks. In University Communications, we use analytics to both understand social media performance and to inform future decisions about how we present and share content on our platforms.

Today, we’re going to talk about how we collect this valuable information, specifically on Twitter.

Twitter analytics shows you how your audience is responding to your content, what’s working, and what’s not. You can use data-driven insights to optimize your future content and get better results whether that’s more engagement, more website traffic, or more overall impressions.

You can access Twitter Analytics by visiting analytics.twitter.com or by tapping your profile and selecting “Analytics” from the drop down menu:

Account home

When you first log in, you’ll see the account home page, which is basically a monthly Twitter report card. This page spotlights top-performing tweets and introduces you to influencers in your network:

Twitter Activity Dashboard

Although the Twitter analytics home page provides a nice overview, the best information (IMO) is on the Tweet Activity Dashboard. By clicking the “Tweet” tab, you’ll be able to track the number of impressions, engagements, and engagement rate for each and every Tweet you send:

For a more granular view of the volume of each type of engagement, you can click on the specific Tweet:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screencapture-analytics-twitter-user-DukeU-tweets-2021-05-18-12_05_47-1.jpg

This allows you to suss out the specific types of engagements your Tweet received. For example, we know that a Tweet with a social media card will on average receive more link clicks than a Tweet with a photo and the link in the Twitter caption.

But the most useful feature (again IMO) is the ability to adjust the date range and export your data as a CSV file:

This feature allows you to sort through the exported data using Excel in ways that are impossible within the platform itself.

Now what?

There are several data columns in the export, so you can develop a customized analysis on whatever metric makes the most sense for your account strategy. Here are a couple common terms and definitions to get you started:

Impressions
A total tally of all the times a Tweet has been seen.

Reach
The number of users who saw an impression of your Tweet in their timeline. Twitter does not provide this metric in their analytics dashboard, so generally you would need a third-party tool to determine your reach.

Engagement
A Twitter user’s interaction with a Tweet, including Retweets, replies, likes, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, or Tweet expansion.

Engagement Rate
This varies slightly by platform, but for Twitter engagement rate is calculated by the number of engagements divided by impressions.

Clicks
There are several kinds of Twitter “clicks” available in the downloaded analytics — user profile clicks, url clicks, hashtag clicks, etc. For our purposes, we track url clicks to determine the amount of traffic we’re driving to Duke websites.

We use Excel to aggregate our data so we can find common trends among our top Tweets, determine particular days/times that work best with our audience, and compare our performance year-over-year.

Duke University Social Media Twitter Analytics Summary Spreadsheet
@DukeU Twitter Analytics Over Time
April 2021 Analytics Monthly Snapshot

By understanding which content items get the most engagement, you can start seeing trends over time — and then applying those insights to future tweets — you’ll be able to better connect with your audience.

How to Make the Most of Your Website on Social Media

To get the most out of your social media efforts, you’ll want to make sure that your website links show up properly. So today, we’re going to talk about the importance of ensuring your website looks great on social media and provide the tools that’ll help enhance your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

You’re likely already aware that each page of your website should have a title tag and meta description for SEO reasons. But did you also realize you can specifically customize how your website content displays on social media platforms? The customizations are called social media cards and they make your content more engaging by adding images and summaries when you (or anyone else for that matter) share your links on social media.

Similar to the meta tags that tell programmatic robots (like Google) about the pages on your site, social media bots scan the page associated with your link to determine what info should be displayed with it in a user’s newsfeed. If the bots can’t find anything, they take their best guess. The results can vary from boring to comical. But by enabling social media cards on your website, you can control these meta tags so social media platforms accurately determine the title, description, and image that gets displayed. 

The two main types of tags you’ll need are Twitter Cards and Open Graph. 

Twitter Cards

The difference between a bare hyperlink and an engaging Tweet is a small bit of code on your link’s website.

In order for these lovely link previews to display on Twitter, your website must have Twitter Cards enabled. Adding a few lines of markup on your website means links to your content will have a “Card” with photo, title, and description to help drive readers to your content.

There are technically four different types of Twitter cards, but the one we find most useful is “Summary Card with Large Image.”

Once the correct meta tags are added to your webpage (either by you or your website administrator), you can run the URL through the validator tool to test how the link will look on Twitter. This tool also works for any website if you’d like to see what a link would look like before Tweeting. This is helpful since sometimes websites use different images in their meta tags than appear on the site itself.

A few notes:

  • The most commonly recommended image size for social media cards is 1200×628 since this size fits on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For Twitter, you’ll want your image to be at least 300×157 and no bigger than 4096×4096.
  • Often, Twitter Cards are set to pull the first image on a page as a default. Be careful with this since Twitter will crop the image to make it fit the card. You might end up with a pixelated version or a vertical headshot where only the person’s nose is visible.
  • If you update the tags for your page (say you found a typo in your title or need to switch out the image), you’ll want to use the Twitter Card validator to force Twitter to do a fresh scrape of your page’s URL. This will cause Twitter to pull the new meta tag, ensuring that the most recent, accurate information is shared. Otherwise, Twitter might pull from an outdated cache instead. 

Open Graph

Facebook and LinkedIn both generate link previews based on Open Graph meta tags. Like Twitter, if these Open Graph tags are missing or incomplete, the link preview will also be incomplete.

Facebook Guide to Sharing for Webmasters
Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn

The Facebook Debugger is a great tool to see how a Facebook link will look before you post it. It’ll let you see all the information that the Facebook Crawler is pulling. Like Twitter, if you updated the image or preview text and it’s not displaying, click “Scrape Again” once or twice to force Facebook to get the updated information.

Recommendations from Facebook:

  • 200×200 pixels is the minimum allowed image dimensions.
  • The image file size cannot exceed 8 MB.
  • If your image is smaller than 600×315 pixels, it’ll still display but the size will be much smaller.
  • When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook Crawler scrapes and caches the meta data from the URL. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be rendered, which means the first person who shares your link won’t see a rendered image. You can pre-cache your images and avoid this by running the URL through the Debugger.
  • If you update the image, the original share will continue to show unless you refresh it in the post.

Since LinkedIn also used Open Graph tags, it functions much like Facebook. The LinkedIn Post Inspector works just like the Facebook Debugger. Paste your URL and select “Inspect” to see what your link will look like on LinkedIn.

So if your site doesn’t currently have social media cards, we’d highly recommend having them added.

How to Setup Open Graph and Twitter Cards for WordPress

If various reasons prevent the addition of social media cards to your website, you can still share your content on social media. It’s just a little bit harder. 

Our recommendation is to share your text with the link and applicable image. Make sure to use the correct image size for the social media platform. Also, to meet accessibility standards, you’ll need to add alt text to the image. This can be done natively in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but only a few schedulers (Hootsuite, Sprout, etc.) have this feature. And lastly, we do have a Duke-branded link shortener available through Shib login.

So in summary, it’s key to properly manage your website content and how it displays on social media platforms rather than letting Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn determine how it’s displayed for you. By optimizing Twitter Cards and Open Graph and validating the accuracy of your website content in how it’s displayed, you can curate your content specifically for each audience you have on different social channels.

Part I | Twitter

Neon Twitter logo sign

Introduction

Of all the social media platforms we’re going to discuss, Twitter is the medium most built for efficiency and speed. This is due to several mechanics.

First, Twitter limits its users to 280-character posts. Often seen as a hindrance, this is one of my favorite aspects. Twitter is the social media embodiment of William Strunk’s “Omit needless words” and actually forces you to make strategic edits to help capture attention in a concise manner. When I’m converting our website content to social media posts, I almost always start with Twitter because tweeting makes me get to the point and is often the best way to discover the “heart” of a story.

In turn, these bite-sized nuggets of information called Tweets make it possible for users to skim a lot of information really fast. Twitter’s feed is ordered, for the most part, chronologically (where Facebook and Instagram are decidedly not) which guarantees fast distribution (although not necessarily quality). The newest stuff is generally on top, making Twitter the place for what’s happening right now. Couple this with hashtags and trending topics and it’s not surprising Twitter is the preferred platform for breaking news.

And once that news is out there we arrive at the key player in the Twitter machine: the retweet button. At the heart of all social media platforms is the ability to share, and Twitter’s retweet mechanic is by far the most efficient example on the World Wide Web today.

Before 2009, Twitter users had to manually retweet each other by copying text, pasting it into a new window and physically typing RT before the OP’s handle all before hitting “send.” Twitter decided to build this behavior into its product — a standard practice in tech — and boy did they. Turns out, copying and pasting made people look more closely at what they shared and think about it just a smidge longer. But the retweet button has eliminated that friction and thus exacerbated outrage-sparked sharing and the wanton spread of misinformation.

[Side note: Facebook took notice and, due to their lack of viralability in the 2012 election, decided to add their version of a RT: the share button. Let’s put a pin in that and come back to it.]

So what does this mean for communicators? First, anyone using Twitter has to adjust to the way they think about their use of language due to the character limit. This functionality has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar and the complexity of the communication. Also, please be advised that navigating the brevity of Twitter lingo does take practice in the actual medium. Re-using website text just isn’t going to cut it.

Second, Twitter moves quickly and thus timing influences your success on the platform almost as much as the content itself. When faced with a breaking news type story, you have two choices: Break the news yourself or have Twitter break the news for you. (There are definite pros and cons to both strategies, but for this blog we’re assuming you want to be in control of your own story.)

And lastly, because Twitter is so fast and content is so easily shareable the platform can be responsible for fueling the momentum of false news. MIT researchers found that false news on Twitter spread faster, deeper and more widely than true news. Unfortunately, it’s not just influencers and Russian bots to blame; it’s ordinary Twitter users, with modest followings, who have a bias for the “sensational, unverified, emotional and false” … amplified by the millions. For communicators, this means keeping a vigilant eye out and constantly combatting the untrue.

Well, that’s all for now. Next up, Facebook. Until then 👋

Social Media is the Message

Fifty-six years ago, scholar Marshall McLuhan published “Understanding Media,” and 14 years ago I was assigned to read it as part of an undergraduate elective course, “Media, Culture and Society.” Clocking in at over 500 pages, McLuhan’s seminal work is a bit of a doorstop, but the text’s best-known phrase — “The medium is the message” — is one I haven’t forgotten. Even though McLuhan’s theory predates the digital age, his work still provides perspective on new communication platforms such as social media.

What McLuhan meant by this expression was that the actual content (i.e. this blog post) is beholden to the medium through which it’s being delivered (i.e. the computer or smartphone on which you’re currently reading). That is, the technology delivering the message (i.e. your printing presses, TVS, radios, websites, so forth and so on) inherently change how we communicate and, in so doing, alter or even supersede the message.

One of the most famous historical examples is the 1960 Richard Nixon/John F. Kennedy debate. TV audiences thought the good-looking JFK emerged victorious, while radio listeners believed Nixon to be the victor. (Some even go so far as to state that Kennedy would never have been president without the medium of television.) Same content, but what people thought had happened was very different depending on the medium they were using.

A more recent example is the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical CATS, whose stage version featuring elaborate costumes and much-lauded choreography appealed to millions for years, while its CGI-laden cinematic counterpart, well, didn’t.

Back to the matter at hand, all this is to say that the way your audience interprets, understands and engages with your content is influenced heavily by the platform you’re using and how you’re using it. From Facebook’s live video to Instagram’s filters to Twitter’s character limit, it’s important to look at each platform as a unique opportunity when crafting a story and to use each platform’s unique parameters to help shape your message. The rest of this blog series will examine how the technology behind each social media platform influences the way its users interpret its messages.

So what does this mean for communicators? First, anyone using Twitter has to adjust to the way they think about their use of language due to the character limit. This functionality has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar and the complexity of the communication. Also, please be advised that navigating the brevity of Twitter lingo does take practice in the actual medium. Re-using website text just isn’t going to cut it.

Part I | Twitter

Social Media Do’s & Don’ts

Whether you’re looking to expand your social media efforts or simply keep pace with the competition, here are some tips, tricks and some of my personal preferences that might make the job slightly easier and your content all the more share-able.

THE THOUGHTFUL ART OF TAGGING

We’ve all seen the @ symbol. Every major social media network offers the ability to tag other users, which you should do. But there are some rules (more like guidelines).

First, a tag is not a hashtag and should not be used the same. A tag identifies the person or brand and notifies them you’ve mentioned them in a post. A hashtag identifies posts on a specific topic. (More on that later.)

Tags work very much like starting a conversation in real life. They’re the social media equivalent of a “heads up,” helping to signify to another user that you’re talking about them, alerting them to potential topics of interest, and/or initiating a chat.

Much like there is an art to conversation, so too is there an art to tagging. Tag no one and you miss opportunities for positive conversations. Tag everyone and you’ll turn them off and they’ll tune you out — Kind of like someone calling your phone repeatedly and leaving a bunch of voicemails (boo).

  • DO: Use tags on all social media platforms
  • DO: Be selective about who you’re tagging
  • DO: Limit tags to two or fewer per post and to users who would be legitimately interested in your content
  • DO: Incorporate tags into the general flow of your writing
  • DON’T: Tag anyone & everyone who just might be interested in your content
  • DON’T: Tag yourself
  • DON’T: List a bunch of tags at the end of your post

HASHTAGS ARE NOT #MEANT #TO #BE #USED #LIKE #THIS

Hashtags are a great way to join a conversation and/or categorize your post for others to find with ease. However, excessive hashtag use is one of the most irritating social media habits to avoid (IMO). A well-used hashtag can increase engagement, but too many or inapplicable hashtags render your post illegible and gives your account an air of desperation.

This section’s title trends towards the hyperbolic, but even the below tactic is rather unadvisable:

Also keep in mind, hashtags do work differently on each platform. For your convenience, the one and only Sonja put together this most practical of presentations. And if you’re in the market for Duke specific hashtags -> Well we have a list for that.

  • DO: Use hashtags appropriate to your content
  • DO: Use hashtags differently depending on the platform
  • DO: Check hashtags to make sure they don’t have unintended or alternate meanings
  • DON’T: Use inapplicable hashtags just to join trending topics
  • DON’T: Over hashtag — For maximum engagement, you pretty much get 1 or 2 per post and that’s it (except on Instagram)

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

Every day millions of people upload millions of social media images. It’s true that photos usually garner greater engagement, but those that inspire actual engagement rather than a cursory glance are few and far between. Why? Too many images are low-quality, unappealing, incorrectly sized or just flat out boring.

The images you share with a post are every bit a part of the story you’re telling as the text. Actually images are more emotionally resonate, so your image will generally supersede the accompanying text as the main takeaway for your audience. So a pixelated photo or an image without a focal point is like showing up to a cocktail party in your worn-out pajamas.

  • DO: Use the right size image for the right platform – Sprout’s handy list is a good place to start
  • DO: Improve your visual literacy (Words have meanings — So do images)
  • DO: Use visuals with consistent color and design aesthetic (if possible)
  • DO: Plan your social content with visual imagery in mind
  • DON’T: Use headshots alone on social platforms — There’s almost always a better way
  • DON’T: Use graphics on your Instagram feed — Trust us
  • DON’T: Post blurry or pixelated pictures

A CHAIN IS ONLY AS STRONG AS ITS WEAKEST LINK

This section begins with one overarching message: People are less likely to click on a link if they don’t trust where it takes them.

There is a lot of bad content on social media, so people tend to be a tad skeptical. This means we have to work even harder to gain users’ trust, most of the time before they ever click on that link we’re sharing.

When it comes to links, looks aren’t everything but they certainly make a difference. The main platforms we use to share links — Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn — use social cards, which allow the content creator to choose the image, title and description that displays on social media platforms when someone shares the content.

Without social cards on your website, we have to manually upload (and alt text to) an image every time we (and anyone else for that matter) share your link. The alternative is to live with whatever image the platform pulls in from your website, which is more-times-than-not most unflattering. Facebook and LinkedIn allow for some customization when posting natively. Twitter does not.

If your website does not have social cards (especially Twitter Cards), please talk to your web developer to have them added. If you do have social cards, please be cognizant of what images are being pulled in. Decapitated headshots and too small images don’t do anyone any favors and diminish the chance a reader might actually click your link (unless you’re indeed trying to scare them away).

  • DO: Have your web developer add social cards to your website
  • DO: Pay attention to what images the cards pull in on different platforms
  • DO: If your website uses vertical images, plan to have horizontal options for social
  • DON’T: Share sketchy links to sources that might not be trustworthy
  • DON’T: Bury your link in a bunch of tags and/or hashtags like it’s a word search puzzle

THE END IS NEAR

Since we’ve given you examples of what not to do, here’s a Tweet that gets all four things right to end today’s conversation:

Well that’s all the advice I have for this blog post outing. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and be sure to check out our previous entries as well as be on the lookout for upcoming posts on all manner of topics related to the wide world of social media. Until then 👋